


Like Wine to the Flame

by prairiecrow



Series: Like Wine to the Flame [1]
Category: Knight Rider (1982)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Demons, First Time, High Fantasy, Inferi, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-06
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2018-04-03 02:31:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4083295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Only a fool would give wine to an Inferus -- particularly to an Inferus of the Eos of Fire. </p><p>Mikal does so anyway, with unpredictable results.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Wine to the Flame

I actually met them, you know — oh yes, and not just once, but many times thereafter.  
  
Heh. Thought that would get your attention! Now, pour me a full cup of that excellent Cyprosian red you've been hoarding for yourself… ah, thank you most kindly! It certainly does cut the dust in the throat on such a hot Numari night, doesn't it? But you're not here to talk wines and vintages, are you? Although wine does come into this tale, and in a way you might not expect —  
  
— but I'm getting ahead of myself. You want to know about the night I first saw _them_ in person: a cool autumn night in the distant borderlands of L'Tavu'sar, almost fifteen years ago. They'd just delivered one of the famous Dukes of Tavu'char from a singularly nasty plague of bandits on his northern border, and the good Duke was holding a banquet in their honour — no ordinary banquet either, but one in the grand Tavu style, with rivers of fine drink and mountains of delicious food and bevies of beautiful young dancer acrobats, both male and female, to tempt the eye and later on, to delight the flesh. Mikal, red-blooded young male that he was, had both eyes firmly fixed on the sweet bouncing bosoms of the dancing girls; while Kyatt, an Inferus seated to his Master's left in a place even more honourable than Mikal's own chair (such a scandal! such murmurings behind hands and wondering stares!) observed Mikal's pleasure with a slight smile of refined tolerance — and while Mikal acquitted himself nobly in the face of such luxurious bounty, Kyatt himself ate sparingly from a small crystal dish of the purest honey and drank only the clearest spring water from a plain silver chalice.  
  
Honey, you may exclaim, and water — for one of the demonic Inferi, whose diet is normally comprised of raw blood, and the more terrified the better? Well, of course you know, as half the civilized world knows by now, that Kyatt of Mansion Wiltan was no more an ordinary Inferus than… well, than I'm a common hedge Crafter, if I may be so bold in my own praise. The Duke and his nobles certainly learned as much that evening fifteen years ago, when they found Kyatt more than willing to take part in the convoluted learned debates at table which the Tavu gentry delight in: and what Mikal lacked in scholarly acumen, his Servant more than compensated for by his ready wit, his encyclopedic learning, and his keen appreciation of the finer points of philosophy. None of them had ever seen the like, and I can testify that by the point when members and visitors of the Court began to pair off for the more carnal stage of the festivities, several ladies (and more than one man) of the Duke's entourage were casting speculative longing glances in his direction — yes, wrapped in rune-inscribed raven cerements and flowing black robes though he was, his only visible skin (between his finely carved cheekbones and his smooth forehead) as pale as the first fall of snow, his eyes like cabochon rubies lit from within by subtle fires…  
  
Ah, is it so obvious? Of course I was quite taken with him myself: many Inferi possess a certain crude animal charisma, but Kyatt was a perfectly polished gem, a creature of mind as much as a construct of perfect form. He was clearly enjoying the rapid cut and thrust of competing ideas immensely — and perhaps it was that fuel added to his already considerable inner fires, that stimulation beyond the norm, which prompted him to finally accept Mikal's teasing repeated offer of a full cup of the purple wine of Cypros… yes, my Lord, not unlike the cups we're enjoying right now. Perplexing, isn't it, how history works in rounds?  
  
Only a fool would offer wine to an Inferus. If they are crafted from the Eos of Water or of Earth, it has no effect on them whatsoever; if from the Eos of Air, it makes them flighty; but Kyatt… well, Kyatt was crafted from the Eos of Fire, the swift and searing sirocco of the Numian Desert. This I learned much later from Bonna Bartan-Wiltan herself, one of the greatest Rune-Crafters of this or any other Span — but I guessed as much myself that night in the hall of Duke K'ti'ka, when Mikal finally wheedled his Servant into taking a sip from his own cup. And Kyatt, who had a prickly contrary spirit when provoked too far, didn't merely sip: no, he drank the whole cup straight down, then set it pointedly back in front of Mikal before turning to the Duke again and continuing with the point he'd been in the process of making so eloquently…  
  
Ah! It makes me sigh just to think of it, all these years later, though my flesh has grown considerably colder in the interim. At the tables all round us the gentry were progressing from intimate murmurs over dessert to kisses and embraces; the dancers were weaving figures ever more suggestive and seductive… but Mikal's attention was rapidly becoming divided, because — well, the vast majority of the Inferi are little better than animals granted some limited power of speech, and no full man can be seduced by a brute beast, but Kyatt… Kyatt was an Inferus of Fire, wrapped skin-tight in thin layers of intricate runes that bound his inhuman Power to merely human service, and have you ever seen what happens when you pour wine freely onto an open flame?  
  
Indeed: _conflagration_. Within minutes of accepting Mikal's challenge to silence his obstreperous Master, the heat coming off of Kyatt was a palpable thing. And the scent! It radiated from him through his neatly spoken words, a distillation of roses and myrrh and the Sun blazing down upon miles of clean desert sand: it bespoke the vastness of his Spirit's home, the pitiless field of relentless light and soul-parching emptiness, so magnificently lethal that it draws men irresistibly into its heart to suffer and to die and to be swallowed by its silence, never to return. It made the delicate runes on all his visible cerements glow muted crimson, not merely the Speech Rune directly over his thinly masked mouth — and Mikal's appreciative gaze was dragged away from the sinuous dancers, away from the entwining figures of the court below the head table, to lock onto the slender elegant figure at his side. He stared as if he had never seen it before, this Construct that had served him every day for the better part of the three years — he stared, and when a servant refilled his cup he drank without shifting his gaze for an instant — he stared, and Kyatt spared not a glance for him, apparently too engaged in the satisfactions of intellectual debate to notice even such focussed attention.  
  
(Learning all that I later learned, I doubt for a single instant that this was actually the case. I was to discover that while Kyatt generally adopted an attitude of prim rectitude, he in fact possessed a sense of mischief that would do any lemur of Zurha proud.)  
  
But back to that autumn evening in Tavu'char —  I saw it with my own eyes, every bit of it. And when Kyatt rose gracefully from his chair with a remark on the lateness of the hour, then bid the head table a most courteous goodnight, Mikal only nodded mutely when he asked permission to retire… and stared after him as he wove through the sensual broil of the Court, arrow-straight and pure and isolated in his robes of priestly ebony… then, half a second after Kyatt had vanished through the archway, Mikal almost upset his own chair in his haste to rise and follow.  
  
Yes, I saw it all. And it is a measure of how grateful the Duke and his Court were for the crushing of the bandits that they did not, on the following day, imprison Mikal for arraignment before the Emerald Tribunal and send their most powerful Crafters to rend Kyatt's cerements to tatters. For it was then, as now, a capital offence to consort with an Inferus — a crime worse than bestiality, for at least beasts are, as we are, creatures of flesh and blood, while the Inferi are part of the Eos and thus utterly demonic even when clad in a Forged body.  
  
But the Duke owed Mikal (and Kyatt) the lives of all those the bandits would have killed had they been permitted to continue their raids, so he chose to look the other way. And thus the Son of Wiltan and his Servant rode away freely in the frosty grey light of a fall morning, mounted on the fine coal-black horses Kyatt had conjured… and if Mikal looked a good deal more hungover than a glorified Hero should, Kyatt kept virtuously silent on the matter.  
  
That was the first time I saw them — and the last for almost a year and a half, although I kept my eyes and ears open for news of their travels. The second time —  
  
— well, that's going to cost you more than a cup or two of Cypros. Shall we say tomorrow night, around the same time? Excellent. Fifteen Lotuses should be suitable payment for my next turn as a Bard, wouldn't you agree?  
  
I thought you might. Goodnight, little Lord — and I hope you may sleep well, if _their_ pursuing images do not haunt your dreams too persistently…  
  
THE END


End file.
